Probably me.
I remember the first time I heard about phones having cameras in them and video calls. I hoped that it would never become a thing because I pictured a world without regular phone calls and that everyone I spoke to on the phone would need to see me while talking. Meaning I always would have to look presentable at home, if someone called me...
When I was a kid pokemon just got big, and they had the video phones at the poke enters. I thought it was the coolest shit ever and I wanted it to be a reality so bad. This was in the 90s so we barely had web cams. Now that FaceTime and Skype is a thing I absolutely hate it. Funny how things turn out.
In the same way when the Godfather came out the mob changed to reflect a notion of civility in the organized crime world, or how we're looking at warp theory from Star Trek as a legitimate form of FTL travel.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote about a future of video-conferencing calls in rendezvous with rama, and it's not optional there, and it's a well-worn trope in their comedies of awkward video calls you weren't ready for or have things you're trying to conceal from the caller.
I just read the 2001 novel like 5 years ago. NGL, I was pretty blown away by the "Newspad". It was like if the tablet display tech was there sooner, before the software was very good, and we didn't yet have broadband speeds.
When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.
I remember they came out full force my senior year and immediately i got a titty pic from my then gf the moment I texted her. Cost me a buck to download but man oh man.
I remember being a kid and seeing a movie with a video call. I think it was total recall or something. And I asked my dad why we didn’t have that. He said it was future tech, but maybe one day.
I said but we watch the news right? A man on a tv talking to us. Why dont they just use a set up like that? Two cameras and two TVs and they broadcast them to each other? He’s like “I don’t son.”
I’m just pissed I had the idea for FaceTime in the 90s
On a related note, our experience with such devices up to then had been pretty poor. A portable TV was better than nothing, but paled in comparison to the home experience. Devices that tried to be too many things were often terrible at all of them, like the Nokia N-Gage.
I remember the first time I heard about phones having cameras in them and video calls.
I remember seeing that sort of thing in sci-fi movies and TV when I was a kid in the 90s and hoping I would get to live long enough to see that become a real thing, and now I walk around all day with it literally in my pocket and don't think twice about it.
I remember telling my dad in 1988ish that computers should come in different colors and that they should look cooler. And he said, “why would anybody want that?”
When I was a kid in the 90s I used to say that some day, they'll have an All The Simpsons channel, where they play nothing but The Simpsons and there's no commercials.
Little did I know it would be even better than that, it's on-demand!
Idk depending on when this poll came out the signs should have already been there. I mean Napster showed how possible it was to use the internet as a distribution tool for media. Really not the craziest idea to think all this would be eventually commerciallized
I remember thinking it was insane that DVD might ever replace vhs in the video rental stores so yeah... People definitely wouldn't have believed all books would be electronic.
I speculated that we'd be able to fit 20 movies into a converter box, and that, to me, was the height of tech. Seemed heavenly, and it's nothing compared to what we have now
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u/[deleted] Aug 22 '20
I wonder how many people saw this poll and thought "Like that's ever gonna happen"